Jeff Spock make his living writing video game scripts, as well as writing prose fiction. He lives in the town of Le Bar sur Loup in the south of France. His story for the 2020 Visions anthology is called “Teh Afterl1fe.” Those are not typos. This is typical spelling in gamer slang, and it comes from something called leetspeak, or simply leet.
As you might expect with somebody so deeply embedded into video games, Jeff’s story involves computers and games. It isn’t the gaming aspect that caught my attention. In fact, I nearly rejected the story, but I don’t make any rejection decisions rashly. I kept almost everything for at least 24 hours before rejecting so I garner some objectivity.  Good thing, too, because rejecting this story would have been a huge mistake on my part.
One sign of a good story is the ability to stay in the mind long after the reader has finished reading it. That turned out to be the case with Jeff’s story, and the more I thought about it, the better I liked the story. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. Now, I think it is among the more memorable stories in the collection and that’s a testament to Jeff’s writing ability.
While the story is memorable, it’s another one of those cases where if I start describing the story, I will release too many spoilers. This is one story where the experience is made by not knowing what will happen next. I don’t want to deprive anyone of that experience.
A cool side-effect of keeping Jeff’s story is that the collection has a screenwriter from the original Star Trek series (David Gerrold) appearing in the same table of contents as a guy named Spock. Serendipity can be fun.
